


emptiness by the handful

by patrokla



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Episode: so4e04 Marry Fuck Kill, Family Issues, Gen, Inappropriate/Irreverent Attitudes Towards Death, M/M, Mid-Season, Unreliable Narrator, projecting onto quentin coldwater? it's more likely than you think, who apparently has no name
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-09
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2020-01-07 11:06:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18409370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patrokla/pseuds/patrokla
Summary: “He’s dead now, I think we can stop criticizing him,” Quentin says, and his mom does that thing where she’s not actually rolling her eyes because that would be childish and inappropriate. Instead, she just looks up for a moment and blinks up at the ceiling, or God, maybe, commiserating with them about Quentin and what a - a Quentin he is.





	emptiness by the handful

**Author's Note:**

> This isn't a fic I was planning on writing, but I re-watched 4x04 last night and I had a lot of questions like: why is Quentin almost chipper in that first scene with Julia? Why did the Monster justify its plane-breaking activities by telling Quentin they were his planes? What is Quentin's mom's name? What kind of Brian-related aftermath did we not get to see? This fic attempts to answer some of these questions.
> 
> Warnings: Quentin-typical mental health, Quentin-typical nonsense, a terrible parent-child relationship, alleged character death. Usual Magicians stuff.
> 
> Title adapted from Anne Carson.
> 
> 4/10: made some minor edits to foolish syntax choices.

 

 

> "The mad state is, as he emphasizes over and over again, empty. Teeming with emptiness. Knotted on emptiness. Immodest in its emptiness. You can pull emptiness out of it by the handful.
> 
> “I am not here. I am not here and never will be.”
> 
> You can pull it out endlessly."
> 
> \- Anne Carson, “TV Men: Artaud” in _Men in the Off Hours_

  
—  
  
Two days after Quentin gets a voicemail from his mom, he uses a whisper of magic to clean his (Brian’s) black blazer. He washes his hair, and tries to comb the wispy short ends of his (Brian’s) hair into place. He gets dressed and lets himself be dragged out of the apartment by Julia to get coffee. He smokes his (Brian’s) cigarettes absentmindedly while teasing Julia about Penny 23, feeling so divorced from any earthly emotion that he can almost see the shape of his grief. He forgets that he’d promised himself he wouldn’t smoke, because his mom will smell it and know that he’s still - him. As though she could forget.  
  
Quentin drives to his dead dad’s house to fight with his alive mom. He keeps it together on the drive over by listening to a classic rock station. He (Brian) hates classic rock, but that’s fine. It’s good to have some distance.  
  
—  
  
“He’s dead now, I think we can stop criticizing him,” Quentin says, and his mom does that thing where she’s not _actually_ rolling her eyes because that would be childish and inappropriate. No, she just looks up for a moment and blinks up at the ceiling, or God, maybe, commiserating with them about Quentin and what a - a _Quentin_ he is.  
  
(Sometimes he wonders if she would’ve liked Brian better. Brian was reliable, and practical - for a PhD candidate, anyway - and Brian went to his dad’s funeral. Brian’s mother was a nice woman who raised him herself after his dad died, and always supported him. Brian’s mother had remarried recently, to a wealthy man who wanted to spoil her, and Brian hadn’t heard from her in a few months because the two of them had gone off on a cruise to all the tourist-y tropical islands, and Brian was just happy that she was happy, because she deserved it.  
  
Brian’s mom didn’t exist.)  
  
—  
  
Quentin’s mom had never called him by a nickname. Not Curly Q, like his dad, which she deemed too whimsical. Not ‘Quenn’, like Julia had called him for years because he didn’t enunciate his Ts. Not even ‘Q’, which was right there, begging to be used.  
  
There’d been a therapist, probably early in undergrad, who’d asked him what kind of relationship he wanted to have with his mom. He’d tried to explain that he just wanted her to think he was worthwhile, and the therapist had asked him what that meant and he didn’t know.  
  
It’s the kind of thing you can just tell about your parents, whether they think you’re worth all the trouble. She’d never tried to hide which side of the line she came down on, which he supposes is a sort of kindness - letting someone know where they stand with you. He hadn’t appreciated it as a child. He was having trouble appreciating it now.  
  
—  
  
The Monster finds him, because it always finds him. It’s probably something magic, something gods can just do, although Quentin had once spent a few long minutes imagining that it had to do with Eliot and how he and Quentin always found each other. But the Monster had found Brian, Quentin and Eliot nowhere on the scene, so that was clearly a false hypothesis.  
  
The Monster is eating frozen peas purchased by his dead dad, presumably at some point before said dad had died. It’s an absurdity. There is no point in trying to stop the Monster, but Quentin still feels an urge to take the peas and give it some goldfish crackers or something. Frozen peas. Jesus.  
  
It probably means something that the Monster begins smashing planes because it knows that they now belong to Quentin. Once upon a time, Eliot and Quentin had shared everything but shampoo, something Eliot held firm opinions on even in Fillory. Is that why the Monster thinks Quentin’s things and time and self are so - shareable? This seems unlikely, but it’s an attractive thought to his brain, which will desperately want new ways to correctly apportion all blame for the current situation to Quentin. Just as soon as he starts feeling things again.  
  
In the meantime, light years from his feelings and his brain, able to see all of the stupid inner workings of it in detail, Quentin decides to smash some planes. The Monster laughs, and he can’t pretend it’s Eliot’s laugh because they sound nothing alike. The Monster does the first helpful thing it’s ever done for Quentin, and hands him more planes to smash. The Monster leans over and tells him that Eliot is dead, and puts a hand on his shoulder, and gives him another plane.  
  
—  
  
“I promise he didn’t suffer,” the Monster says. It is trying to make eye contact with Quentin, and Quentin is trying to suffocate his feelings, which he began to feel again sometime between putting his foot through a box of planes and the Monster healing his briefly-broken left pinkie toe. The Monster had shook its head as it did so, exasperated and Monster-fond. Quentin had thought _KILL ME_ at it as loudly as he could, and it had looked even fonder.  
  
Quentin watches the Monster eat fries. He has three boxes of unbroken planes in the trunk of his car. If his mom ever goes back to the garage of his dead dad’s house, she won’t find anything surprising.  
  
She already knows what he's good at.

He breaks things.


End file.
